Welcome to the ROC - MLB's high-tech replay room

Mar. 26, 2014
|

The Associated Press

by Joe Lemire, Special for USA TODAY Sports

by Joe Lemire, Special for USA TODAY Sports

NEW YORK -- Baseball's newly constructed Replay Operations Center (ROC), a 900-square-foot enclave within Major League Baseball Advanced Media's offices in Chelsea, is a space barely larger than the average one-bedroom rental in Manhattan, yet outfitted with 37 high-definition televisions, each of which can be subdivided into a dozen or more smaller displays.

The room will staff up to eight umpires at a time, each of whom will typically track two games simultaneously with the assistance of a video technician. The technician will have real-time access to at least seven cameras of every game (and usually as many as 12) to cue up varying angles of every play to help inform the replay umpires, who have final say on whether to reverse a call.

This hub of the newly expanded replay system is a modern marvel that will reduce the cauldron of scrutiny that surrounded blown calls on the field that were obviously wrong to anyone watching on television. One such call in in the eighth inning of 2012's ALCS Game 2 helped the Tigers score two runs against the Yankees and sparked such postgame outrage that it was a tipping point in Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre's evolved thinking on the need for replay.

"The one thing I didn't want to have happen was something like that really take center stage over the game itself," Torre, MLB's executive vice president for baseball operations, said. "That's when I realized that we certainly can't ignore the technology."

Before this season, there was no recourse for correction, except on disputed home run or boundary calls, which had been reviewable since Aug. 2008. The league pledges transparency with the new system â?? up to and including allowing stadiums to show controversial calls on the Jumbotron â?? as part of its conviction to get calls right.

From the Replay Operations Center (ROC), there is direct connections to all 30 big league ballparks, where nearly 43 tons of equipment were installed to outfit high-home cameras for overhead views of the whole diamond, as well as video stations in the home and visiting clubhouses for each club's video review coordinator. All of this installation came as the result of 32,178-and-counting hours of work and a cost that the league won't divulge.

The league hired two new crews of four umpires to augment its scheduled rotations, which now include stops in the replay center. All 74 rookie and veteran umpires are undergoing a three-day training course to prepare for this new part of the job description that requires a slightly skill set; rather than swiftly and authoritatively making calls based on what they see in real-time with their own two eyes, in the replay room they will often piece together multiple slow-motion angles to make the call. The league estimates most replay reviews should take 60-to-90 seconds, though some will inevitably take longer.

The centralization should help, as umpires in the replay room will be encouraged to collaborate on calls, and will work under the oversight of the inaugural director of replay, Justin Klemm, who was a minor league umpire for nine years.

All of this is an incredible undertaking for a system that won't be used nearly as much as most fans probably expect. A league study of the 2013 season found that there were only 377 missed calls on reviewable plays that met the "clear and convincing" evidence threshold for reversing a call -- that's one blown call for every 6.4 games, meaning there might be 2.5 mistakes on a night with a full slate of 15 games. Only three times last season was there a game with three missed calls, and in none of those games did all three blown calls go against the same team.

That informed the thinking of the current system, in which each manager gets one challenge per game and one additional challenge if the first is used to overturn a call; managers can never challenge three calls in a single game.

Not every play is reviewable â?? balls and strikes and subjective calls such as runner interference and the infield fly rule, for example, will not be â?? and expect the majority of reversed calls to come on tag plays and force plays, which accounted for 86 percent of correctible calls, according to the league's study. That should help minimize the impact of bad calls on the standings.

"That, to me, was always part of the game, but now technology is part of the game," Torre said. "I'm happy for the managers, that it'll keep them from having one or two more sleepless nights."